Housing is the only solution to homelessness

July 22,2024

Punishing the victims of the housing crisis will do nothing to solve it

In a recent political ad dubbed “Real change. The one promise he kept,” Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre contrasted still images of empty city streets from 2015 with photos of those same streets populated by homeless encampments in 2023. Every cut to a new image is marked by a thunderclap and the voice of the prime minister repeating the phrase “real change.” The implication is that the hundreds of thousands of Canadians being pressed into homelessness year after year is a direct result of policies implemented by the Trudeau government.

It’s a low-effort, uninspired bit of advertising that works because it reflects a near-universal understanding that the housing crisis has gotten progressively worse since Trudeau took power nearly a decade ago, and his efforts to address the situation have fallen woefully short.

At first glance the ad appears to tackle the crisis head on, but on closer inspection it actually scuppers any useful analysis. By pointing the lens at the victims of the crisis Poilievre manages to avoid confronting its causes, namely, decades of neoliberal economic policy.

This is nothing new for the Conservative Party leader who fell into a similar pattern last year when he described Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as “hell on earth,” a rhetorical flare which was itself a reprisal of a 2022 National Post article where Poilievre wrote:

Tent cities, open drug use and public safety concerns are now prevalent across Canada. We can no longer live this way. Canadians deserve much better.

Public safety must be at the centre of this conversation, right alongside a focus on treating addiction and supporting Canadians in their pursuit of recovery.

We need tougher sentencing for repeat violent offenders.

Polls suggest this consistency is working. Poilievre is making real political gains by gesturing to the suffering of Canadians. However, acknowledging a problem is not the same as having a solution. Treating people who live in encampments as threats to public safety is not a solution. Punishing the victims of an out-of-control housing market will not end homelessness. Encampment residents will not suddenly be able to afford an apartment after serving a jail sentence or spending 90 days in a drug treatment facility. This is because homelessness is not an addiction issue, a mental health issue, or a criminal issue. It is an economic issue.

The Conservative Party’s messy conflation of mental health, addiction, public disorder, and homelessness (which gets even messier when immigration gets thrown into the mix) makes it harder to understanding any one of these issues on their own, never mind the complex relationships between them.

Let’s take the relationship of mental health and addiction to homelessness as an example.

While the causes of homelessness are economic some folks do attribute their individual experience of homelessness to addiction or mental health. While tragic, these life events are not the causes, they are precipitating events.

Housing researchers use a simple metaphor to explain the difference. Imagine six people playing a game of musical chairs. As the music plays the people circle a ring of five chairs. When the music stops the people scramble to find a chair. Inevitably, one person remains standing. This is the loser. We’ll call him James. James has a fractured fibula and was on crutches during the game. He was in no condition to move quickly and during the scramble he was, to no one’s surprise, left without a chair.

Note that when the music stopped it wasn’t James’ impairment that caused his chairlessness, it was the lack of chairs. Someone was going to lose no matter what.

The same is true for housing. Addiction, mental health, or job loss can precipitate an instance of homelessness, but it is the lack of available housing that renders people homeless. Vulnerabilities decide who will become homeless; housing availability determines that there will be homelessness.

This analysis represents the mainstream consensus among experts, but those who take Conservative political rhetoric seriously could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. In this political climate it’s easy to assume people experiencing homelessness also experience addiction and/or severe mental health issues. From there it’s natural enough to connect some dots and conclude, like jurisdictions across the country have, that the solution to encampments is jails, forced treatment centres, and institutionalization. The numbers, however, paint a very different picture.

Only 20 percent of people entering homelessness experience addiction—a number which jumps to 28 percent for those who have been homeless for over six months. For many it’s not addiction that causes homelessness; it is homelessness that leads to addiction. Similarly, only 25-30 percent of those experiencing homelessness have a severe mental illness whereas time spent unsheltered has been shown to negatively impact mental health.

The well-documented bi-directional relationship of homelessness to addiction and mental health tells us something important: we can end homelessness without solving the crises of addiction and mental health but we can’t solve addiction and mental health without ending homelessness.

This is demonstrated in Finland where homelessness has been all but eradicated thanks to robust state involvement in the housing system, but addiction rates remain some of the highest in Europe. Recent Canadian examples indicate that focusing on recovery and law enforcement to the exclusion of housing and harm reduction not only has no effect on homelessness, but actually make the impacts of drug addiction even more devastating.

The lesson is clear: housing must come first.

When Poilievre talks about homelessness as a public safety issue he brings forward implicit and explicit solutions that simply will not work. Criminalization, forced recovery, and institutionalization will not end homelessness. These ‘solutions’ do not address the economic root of the crisis—they seek only to punish its victims.

Those living in tent cities across this country are experiencing the downstream effects of decades of neoliberal economic policy which has turned our homes over to a predatory investor class. To end homelessness we must restore housing affordability for all. We can achieve this by decommodifying our housing stock, providing meaningful financial supports for those who need them, and investing in publicly built and owned housing.

James Hardwick is a writer and community advocate. He has over ten years experience serving adults experiencing poverty and houselessness with various NGOs across the country.

[Top photo: People living in tents behind Hamilton city hall. Photo courtesy CHCH News/YouTube.​]